Need Help - Serious Hard Drive Problem

I re-installed my original version of XP, and when I initially accessed my 500GB external drive, it was immediately trashed. I read after the fact that the early versions of XP did not recognize anything greater than 120? GB and that it might do this.

I have now installed a new copy of Vista Home Premium, but I was wondering if there was any way to get my files back from the external drive (like a fool, I had no current backup).

Thanks for replying Raakii. Some, but not nearly all, of my folders show up when I access the drive. However, I can open none of them. I get an error message when trying, but it's my home pc and I'm at work right now, so I can't tell you exactly what the message says.

Any additional insight would be helpful, but if that's not enough info, I'll try and post the exact error message tonight.

do a scandisk (with the box to fix errors checked) on the external drive. Maybe this can fix the corruption.

If that doesn't work, you can try the free "testdisk" to try and fix the corruption on that drive. Worst case scenario, testdisk has an addon called "photorec" that software can recover data even from a severly corrupted hard drive.

As long as there is no physical damage to the hard drive, you should be able to recover 99 percent of your data. A few errors on the hard drive, will make it look like the entire drive is bad, but the majority of the data is recoverable.